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The Bat Bomb Invention and Other Odd Facts from History and War

Khalid Elhassan May 10, 2020 33 min

3. An Unfortunate Officer

Sir Arthur Aston. Royal Berkshire History

Englishman Sir Arthur Aston (1590 – 1649) was a scion of a prominent Catholic family from Cheshire, and descended from a long line of professional soldiers. During his lifetime, he gained a reputation as a solid military professional. Unfortunately, he is best remembered for the manner of his demise: he got beat to death by his own wooden leg.

Aston’s father had served in Russia in 1610, then in Poland, for whose king he raised thousands of British mercenaries for a war against the Ottomans in 1621. Aston joined his father in Poland with 300 mercenaries, who went on to form the Polish king’s bodyguard. He fought for the Poles in the Polish-Swedish War of 1626 – 1629, and was captured in 1627. After the war’s end, Aston joined the Swedes, whose king, Gustavus Adolphus, commissioned him in 1631 to recruit an English regiment to fight for Sweden in the Thirty Years War. He did, and Aston and his Englishmen fought in Germany in the 1630s.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.